Over the weekend i decided to do some work to fill out, and update my portfolio. There were a few shirt designs, a couple posters and what not that i had been working on for a while and just couldn’t get done, but everything felt too… similar.

So, i thought it would be fun to do something i have thought about and wanted to get into since i was a kid; video game design.

i sat down on Friday night and scrawled out a very light treatment for a video game, and what elements (colour scheme, screens, character designs, etc.) i might need to get the basic look and feel of the game across.

i landed on a thing i came to call “Descenders”.

Shattered souls. Outcasts. Descenders.

For countless aeons the living have fed the Well, the Chosen throwing themselves down that endlessly dark abyss to satiate the hunger of the nameless Entity spoken of by the Runepriests.

Some go willingly. But all, eventually go.

There are those, however, who can never be chosen. The impure and forsaken who will never know the embrace of the Well. These outcasts are known as Descenders, some venture down the Well in hope of finding a way to become worthy, some go down in search of treasure, a select few go down to find the Entity at the deepest depth, and kill it, thereby ending the cycle.

Descenders are divided into three distinct classes:

Harbingers – Born scarred and hollow eyed, these outcasts are gifted with not only precognitive visions, but also unearthly keen eyesight and hearing. The Harbingers make perfect scouts and marksmen, but are also adept at lightning-quick shock attacks on small groups of enemies, before disappearing back into the darkness.

Berserkers – Massive, hulking, and grey skinned they are seen as brutes perhaps due to their inhuman strength from birth, and an inability to speak, however; they are both strategically minded and capable of telepathic conversation. The Berserkers are equally happy leading parties of Descenders into the Well, or providing much needed muscle power on the almost certainly doomed quests.

Avowed – The Avowed are, perhaps at once, the most and the least human of the Descenders; their outward appearance is mostly human, despite their entirely black eyes. Their voices can dishearten even the most ardent Runepriests, and their ability to cast cold fire from their hands has seen them labelled as demons. Avowed often take a role of authority amongst Descender quests, leading and lighting the path through the darkness of the Well.

This soon became an exercise in creating a coherent design scheme for a video game UI. So i thought about the games i play, and what the necessary screens for those are; among others i posit that the most important ones are the Character Customisation screen, and Control Layout screen.

The Character Customisation Screen – Shows everything your playable character will essentially be, their weapons and their overall abilities. This needs to have a load of information in it, but it needs to be presented in a way that can easily be read and understood. It may contain sub-menus, or further screens and drop-downs, or button prompts to go further into the customisable elements.

The Control Layout Screen – This is where the player learns the intricacies of your control scheme, what button corresponds to which action, it needs to be concise, and since most of these types of screen have arrows and labels all over the place nothing could overlap or intersect for maximum readability.

Still not sure if this project is over yet, so i may update in the near future.

More than a year has passed since my last post. And i have done shamefully little work since then. Having said that i have done SOME work, or rather re-work.

Presented for your consideration;

Imagine a world where cats- those revered animals, so full of eldritch power and a smouldering contempt for humanity– had managed to design, fabricate and utilise power armour that allowed them to fly through space… Now imagine that concept, but on a shirt.

This one is a re-design of a shirt i posted years and years ago, i thought it would be fun to put a cat in a mech suit and elude to a squadron of be-meched cat soldiers, so in the re-design i decided to flesh out the team with three cats in mech suits, flying through space with their little faces, and kitty paws.

Also on the re-work schedule was Rome and Carthage football team designs.

i originally did the first designs for these i think about four years ago, the basic idea was “what if the Punic Wars weren’t just a horrendous loss of life, but a high school football match, between long time rivals from opposite schools”.

i was a pretty big fan of Super Metroid back in the day, haven’t played any games in the series since it was on SNES, but i will always remeber the awesome feeling of being a champion bounty hunter, being the best most competent bad-ass in the galaxy. The big reveal that Samus Aran was a woman was something i will always remember. i never got around to using the Justin Bailey cheat, and to this day i am not entirely convinced it is a real thing.This little design is available for purchase as a sticker, and multiple other formats right here.

Oh, and some new work in the form of the cursed blue shell from the Mario Brothers games. Personally i haven’t played a Mario Bros. game for a long time, but others have, and do, and are, and i go where the money is, baby.

This started out as a mashup of the blue shell design and the Detroit Red Wings logo. Again, not being a hue Mario fan i though the Red Shell was the one everyone feared, however in conversations (most of which i tuned out of, because they were about Mario Bros.) i came across the common complaint that the blue shell was actually the more contemptible shell.

This design can be purchased on many things varying from shirts to stickers, and journals right here.

And some other new work in progress; a series of limited colour palette designs focusing on primary colours and strong black and white contrast the first of which is a blue samurai.